Emergency Services (Interoperability)

Debate between Guy Opperman and Geoffrey Clifton-Brown

Tuesday 12th June 2012 Westminster Hall

[Guy Opperman (Hexham) (Con)]

I suggest that we all owe a huge debt to our emergency services. Would we be able to deal with an ambulance situation, cope with an arrest or fight a fire? I suggest not. Those men and women are the cornerstone of our country and the cream of the crop whom we should support, laud and applaud. I am proud to record my thanks to them, both nationally and locally in my constituency.

This is an issue of great importance, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey) on securing the debate. With the forthcoming Olympics, we have one of the most serious security operations ever mounted in this country, and credit must go to the many security and emergency forces that are preparing for the ultimate test. I have a friend who was trained as a senior nurse in the bulky green chemical, biological, radioactive and nuclear event outfits that make people look like something from Mars. They are extremely useful against nuclear attack, although they will not be troubling Usain Bolt during the 100-metre dash. Such things are good preparation, and as my hon. Friend said, it is clear that the emergency services are working much better together. As various events have tested them over the past five to 10 years, their ability to co-ordinate—under successive Governments—has much improved.

I applaud and welcome all the points raised by my hon. Friend, but most of the issues that I wish to address concern non-life-threatening scenarios. It is clear that we are getting better at dealing with very serious events—the 7/7 bombings are a good example—but I suggest that, in 2012, we are still manifestly struggling to deal with the day-to-day interaction between police, fire and ambulance paramedics. That is not working as it should. It is a question not just of how the services co-ordinate with one another on a day-to-day basis, but of the sharing of buildings, how the location issue is addressed and how people who represent the individual emergency services work together.

Questions asked in the House provide a telling illustration. My hon. Friend has made the fair point that the ambulance service is the responsibility of one Department, the fire service is the responsibility of another Department and the police service, of course, is represented by my hon. Friend the Minister responding to the debate today. The hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) asked a question of the Department of Health on 23 March 2011. She asked the Secretary of State for Health what discussions he had had with ministerial colleagues on

“arrangements to improve liaison between ambulance services and other emergency responders”.

The Minister of State, Department of Health, my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Mr Burns), said:

“The Department of Health, along with the Home Office and the Department for Communities and Local Government, continues to encourage and support regular communication across all emergency services.”—[Official Report, 23 March 2011; Vol. 524, c. 1195W.]

It is laudable that there is support for communication across all emergency services. Everyone would understand that, but I do not get the impression that it is actually happening.

The hon. Lady also asked a question of the Home Office, to which my right hon. Friend the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice replied. The hon. Lady asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department what discussions she had had with ministerial colleagues on

“arrangements to improve liaison between police services and other emergency responders”.

The answer was:

“The strategic defence and security review records Ministers’ agreed intention to improve the ability of the emergency services to work together during emergencies.”—[Official Report, 1 April 2011; Vol. 526, c. 556W.]

Again, it is wonderful that there is an agreed intention to work together.

Undaunted, my hon. Friend the Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire (Simon Hart) asked this question:

“Is the Minister satisfied that local forces are doing enough to share the costs of facilities such as human resources and IT with other public bodies and other emergency services?”

The Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice also replied on that occasion:

“It is important that police forces do more to take up such opportunities. We have already seen an increase in the collaboration between police forces over operational matters, but there are valuable opportunities to collaborate and share services for the back-office functions such as IT and human resources, which would result in significant savings.”—[Official Report, 12 December 2011; Vol. 537, c. 504.]

I endorse all those comments. I come now to the question asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) on 24 January 2012. He asked the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government whether he planned

“to review the level of joint training undertaken by fire and ambulance services.”

The answer from the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), was:

“My Department is working with other Government Departments and the emergency services to improve joint ways of working in response to particular identified risks. In particular, in response to the Report of the Coroner’s Inquests into the London bombings of 7 July 2005, the Government agreed that it would co-ordinate a wider review of multi-agency considerations in single-service training. The Cabinet Office”—

another Department—

“are co-ordinating this review and will ensure that results are made available once it is completed.”—[Official Report, 24 January 2012; Vol. 539. c. 137W.]

I accept entirely that efforts are being made and that steps are being taken down the road, but if ever there was an example of why we have this problem, it is the fact that I have just managed to cite four different Departments, including the Cabinet Office, of all people, having overall control of the review and implementation of the changes. I suggest that unless the Government—successive Governments have failed on this; let us be honest—take control of how we mesh the services together, we will struggle going forward.

This issue is particularly important in a time of austerity. In other countries, the main emergency services share buildings. It might be hard for some people to believe, but in other countries there might be a fire station, an ambulance station and a police station all in the same building, all working together without any fundamental problems from a union that says, “We can’t possibly co-exist with this other organisation,” without any particular problems of individual commanders saying, “We can’t possibly share a building,” and without the problem of Government being told, “We can’t possibly have a situation in which the IT is provided to this organisation but not paid for by this organisation; it’s going to come out of my budget.” There is a possibility that we can amalgamate the services and run them at far less cost to the taxpayer and with much greater efficacy.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I commend to my hon. Friend and to my hon. Friend the Minister the example of what happens in Gloucestershire, where all three services have a common call centre at Quedgeley. Not only does that save costs; it works incredibly efficiently.

[Guy Opperman]

Clearly, in relation to call centres and IT, we are taking steps. There is clearly a positive way forward. However, in broad terms, we have got into a situation in which individual parts of the emergency services in local areas are fighting for their own turf to much too great a degree. It is perfectly understandable that people wish to have an all-singing, all-dancing fire service, ambulance service and police stations. We might totally endorse that, but we have to ask, given that taxpayers’ money is paying for it all, how can we integrate matters better? I suggest that we look not only at the example cited by my hon. Friend, but at examples from overseas, where progress on these matters has been made.

I have the great good fortune to represent more than 1,000 square miles of Northumberland. Parts of the area are semi-urban, but to the west and the north of Hexham is a vast expanse of territory that genuinely suffers from a lack of emergency services. Let me give an example. One of my local schools, a secondary school, has a catchment area bigger than the area covered by the M25. That will enable people to grasp just how large that area is. It is centred around the town of Bellingham, a place where I have spent a great deal of time assisting the Friends of Bellingham Surgery and attempting to understand how we can have ambulance, police and fire services in that location. Currently, we have a police station. I credit the chief constable of Northumberland for retaining that police station. We also have a fire station, but we do not have an ambulance facility. As everyone knows, ambulances are required to have a 75% reach to patients who need urgent medical assistance within eight minutes. In relation to places in the far west of Northumberland, it is patently extremely difficult for the ambulance service to provide that. There are, however, examples of how that situation could be changed. For example, the Friends of Bellingham Surgery and the practice itself have been working extensively—for years, I suggest—to try to get a localised ambulance service. It could be located on the site of the fire station. One would think that that was not a very radical step, but it is clearly quite radical when one considers that these examples are only just being considered at this stage.

Just a mile over the border in Cumbria, there are two examples of local success that I should like to share with the House. In Alston, which my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) represents so successfully, the community is setting up a community-run ambulance, with the backing of the league of friends of the local hospital, but also working with their local health trust and local GPs. The impression given—the project is at an early stage—is that that community ambulance would provide a rural area with a facility that is currently lacking.

Also in Cumbria, last December, the county council, the fire and rescue service and the police have come to an arrangement whereby the emergency services will operate from seven fire stations. Cumbria police have cut back the number of police stations, so the police and the fire services are working in the same building. In a large number of areas, the police have set up in fire stations, with cost savings to both parties and the benefit of interoperability. I suggest that that is clearly the way forward and something that, as police and crime commissioners come into being, individual commissioner candidates will need to consider.

On Saturday, I was delighted to select Mr Phil Butler, a former police officer from Northumbria, as the police and crime commissioner candidate on behalf of the Conservative party for Northumbria’s police and crime commissioner election. The candidates will need to look at the provision of individual police services in a rural area, how they interlink and the funds for the local community going forward.

I look at the individual examples of success in Cumbria and suggest that they are manifestly a good thing. We have to put them in the context of the disastrous FiReControl project. If ever there were an example of a disastrous Government project to provide a single-issue service without integrating it into other services, surely the fire service project—introduced, I am sad to say, by the previous Government—is it. The National Audit Office assessment, issued on 1 July 2011, of the FiReControl programme said:

“The FiReControl project was flawed from the outset because it did not have the support of those essential to its success—local fire and rescue services. The Department rushed the start of the project”

and failed

“to follow proper procedures. Ineffective checks and balances during initiation and early stages meant the Department committed itself to the project on the basis of broad-brush and inaccurate estimates of costs and benefits and an unrealistic delivery timetable, and agreed an inadequate contract with its IT supplier. The Department under-appreciated the project’s complexity, and then mismanaged the IT contractor’s performance and delivery. The Department failed to provide the necessary leadership to make the project successful, over-relying on poorly managed consultants and failing to sort out early problems with delivery by the contractor. The Department took a firmer grip of the project from 2009 and terminated the contract in December 2010 to avoid even more money being wasted”.

That is a classic example of a failure to take one service and work with the other services. That project was introduced at a time, not necessarily of plenty, but when there was an awful lot of money in the Government’s coffers. Notwithstanding the efforts of the Department for Communities and Local Government to fund projects on an ongoing basis, as it has successfully done this year—certainly in my part of the world—it is patently clear that, in times of austerity, it is vital that the emergency services work together.

I will go into the detail of that with an example from my constituency. Setting aside the amazing efforts of the GP’s practice and the fact that the paramedics are increasingly situated in the location of the practice—in other words, in Wooler, and in Bellingham going forward, a paramedic is working with the GP—if an ambulance was required and a paramedic was not available, for whatever reason, we would wait for the ambulance. I have met the area’s paramedic, who is outstanding. Why could not the individual police officer or fireman, with improved, suitable training, step in and act as first responder? It is manifestly wrong not to train individual firefighters and police officers to address such issues on an ongoing basis.

Aside from being a very fat jockey, I was formerly a business man. Just as in business there can be one man, two jobs and everyone works together and can mesh and interlink their respective jobs, so it should be with the individual firefighter, police officer and ambulance man. Another example is the community support officers who we already have in the police. They perform a manifestly brilliant role throughout the country. They are able to assist the police in the performance of their duties, but are fundamentally members of the public given basic training. Why can we not have a community support fireman or paramedic? Why is the fireman unable to interlink with individual police officers and assist the police officer as a CSO? I see absolutely no reason whatsoever why that cannot be the case. Surely, these things must be done in future.

I have discussed the suggestion with my local emergency services. Without naming the individual organisations, it is fair to say that there may be somewhat of a turf war and an issue with individuals protecting their domains. Whether that is about unions or about power, it is not the way forward. Given that these are shared services that we all need and enjoy, there must be a better way going forward. Speaking for myself, if I could secure the construction of one substantial building for the future—for example, in Bellingham—that housed police, fire and ambulance services, I would regard that as a major success.